by Nevil Shute
“I had some work to do,” I said. “That might have happened to anyone.”
“The point is, that it doesn’t. Then, before that, you got water on the knee—not very serious, but you neglected it, and it’s only the mercy of Providence that you’re not lame yet. Frankly, at the time, I thought that it was becoming chronic.”
He paused. “Do you know that you’ve been in my hands six times in the last two years? And it’s only for want of a little care.”
I hadn’t much to say that was worth saying. “I’ve been a pretty good source of income to you, taking it by and large,” I said. “As good as half a dozen old ladies. You don’t want me to mend my ways?”
I must have stung him up, somehow. “Well,” he said drily, “I want you to go on being a source of income to me, anyway.”
There was a little silence.
“I see,” I said. “You think I’m a bad life.”
He thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t. I didn’t like that pleurisy at all. You’ve not got the resistance that you ought to have, but that’s the infection you picked up in the war. But if you take care of yourself, I see no reason at all why you shouldn’t live to be seventy or eighty.”
“God forbid,” I muttered.
He was annoyed. “On the other hand, if you carry on as you’re doing now, you’ll probably be dead within the next five years. You’ll gybe in a squall when there isn’t a motor-boat to pick you up, or you’ll get a pleurisy when I’m not there, or you’ll crash your car where labourers don’t come. And then you’ll die.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s very likely what will happen.”
He was a little disconcerted and lost the thread of his argument. I lay there staring out of the window while he was marshalling his fancies into order again and I heard a steamer’s siren from the river, a sharp double blast. “You might have a look and see what vessel that is,” I said.
He stood up. “A little collier. About five hundred tons.”
I was interested. “The Black Prince?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know them. She’s got one black funnel with a double blue band.” And then he turned from the window and stood looking down on me, his back to the light, his hands in his pockets. “You know,” he said, “speaking as your medical man, I should advise you to get married.”
I was hardly listening. It was the bi-weekly collier from Barry, but she must have had a good passage, because she had saved a tide. Old Penrose, who had had her since the war, had retired a month or so before and the owners had given the command to his nephew, who used to be her mate; a smart young chap who wore a brown bowler hat with his reefer jacket when he came ashore. I wondered if he had taken to forcing her in good weather, and whether she would stand it. Then I came back to earth and Dixon was talking at me still.
He was very earnest. “I don’t know that I’ve ever recommended this before—to anyone. But it’s what you need.”
I eyed him for a minute, and he didn’t like it. “You think so?”
He said: “I do think so. Living alone as you do, you’re simply knocking yourself to bits. And you don’t care a damn about it—do you?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know that I do.”
He came and sat down beside my bed again. “Look here, Stevenson,” he said. “I want you to realise that you’re a case to me, and nothing more. This is a matter of business to me. I’m not trying to ferret round among your private affairs; I don’t know anything about them, and I don’t want to. I’m not trying to get at you. All I want to tell you is that, as your medical adviser, I should advise you to get married. I think if you did that, you wouldn’t find yourself in my hands quite so often.”
I nodded. “You mean that I ought to get someone to look after me,” I said. “I expect you’re right.”
He was relieved. “I’m glad you see it like that,” he said frankly, “because I don’t like giving this sort of advice at all. I was afraid that you might think it a considerable impertinence.”
“Not at all,” I murmured. “Who do you suggest that I should get?”
He smiled. “Anyone you like. There are any number of nice girls about who’d be only too glad to get married to a man of your position and your means. You won’t have any difficulty in that way.”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I’ve got the money. And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?”
He hesitated. “It goes a long way,” he said.
I agreed. “It does. I can pay for anything I want. You produce the medicine, and I’ll pay for it all right.”
He laughed. “I’m a doctor—not a matrimonial agency. I can’t go chasing round the country finding girls for you to marry. But I can promise you, you won’t have any difficulty. Any girl would marry you. You must realise that you’re a very eligible man.”
There was a little silence then. Dixon was right, of course, in what he said; I had realised it myself five years before. A man who lives entirely without women has only two alternatives as the years go on. He gets self-centred and dirty, or he dies.
I laughed. “All right,” I said at last, “I’ll have Irene. I suppose she’ll do as well as anyone. You might tell her when you go home. You’d better send her up to me this afternoon.”
I forgot all that he said to that, nor am I sure that I should write it down if I could remember it; he was very deeply hurt. His wife was dead and he had only the one daughter, and a son who was abroad. I had known the girl for some years by sight; I had watched her grow from a gawky schoolgirl into a plump and homely young woman who kept house admirably for her father, performed indifferently on the tennis courts, rode a bicycle about the town, and read some woman’s paper from cover to cover every week. A most estimable young woman and as dull as ditchwater, but he thought the world of her.
He went away, very grieved and hurt. On reflection I thought that he might see a certain element of humour in the situation, but when he came again he was cold and professional, and I didn’t stir him up.
I got back into my house in the following week, and as soon as I got back I went to work. Dixon was pretty rude about it—and to do him justice, I don’t think it did me a lot of good, myself. I used to go down to my office at about ten o’clock and dictate a few letters that Tillotson would generally have to correct for me, and I would listen to him while he outlined his plans for the freight programme in a series of delicately-worded suggestions for my approval. Then I would send him away and sit in my office for a bit with my head in my hands, nursing a tearing headache; at half-past eleven Miss Soames would bring me a cup of tea and I’d take a handful of aspirins with it, and go for a walk round the yard. By then it would be time for a couple of drinks before lunch, and after lunch there were generally things that needed my attention in the yard. It was during that time that Thelma came in with her bitts carried away, warping at Fowey for the clay. That kept me busy for three days and sent me a journey to Newton Abbot to pick the timber that I wanted for the job, but mostly I spent the afternoons setting up new running gear in Runagate, and trying not to think about my head.
I might have stayed at home for all the good I was. But down at the yard there were things happening and people to talk to; I’ve never been one for sticking in the house by myself, much.
My car took about a month to repair; in that month my cousin Joan Stenning became Lady Stenning. Stenning received his knighthood within half an hour of his landing on the Thames, having sweated and cursed his way through his forty-thousand-mile flight alone round the world in the little Rawdon Dabchick flying-boat. He took nine months over the flight, which was more of a business trip than anything else, and he returned with orders for over a hundred Dabchicks, booked upon the way. He took a cinema camera with him and made films which were worth a considerable sum; his machine was literally plastered with the advertisements of the firms who had supplied him with equipment free. His flight showed a profit of six hundred per cent on the capital involved, an achievement only comp
arable with that of his progenitor, Sir Francis Drake.
His knighthood created a situation in my family which was not without its quiet humour. Joan had married him in 1925, and had gone to live with him in Golders Green, in undistinguished style. The family didn’t like it a bit, Stenning was a professional pilot, and for a long time after their marriage, if you flew from London to Paris, the chances were that you would see him sitting patiently in the cockpit of the aeroplane, high above your head, as you embarked. Even now, if you go to the Rawdon Aircraft Company to charter an aeroplane the chances are that you will be chauffeured by a Knight of the British Empire. The material profits of his flight went mostly to the financiers who had backed him, leaving him with little but his knighthood and experience.
My family didn’t quite know what to do about it. Sir Philip Stenning could no longer be ignored; it was no longer possible to refer to Lady Stenning as poor Joan. I wrote to congratulate him, and got a letter back from Joan in which she asked if I would like to run her up to Scotland for a week.
I really wasn’t fit to drive again, but I wanted that holiday with Joan. It took me two days to get to London because I had to stop in Shaftesbury and go to bed. Stenning had gone to Greece to try and get rid of a few more Dabchicks. I hadn’t let anyone know that I’d been ill, but Joan was very decent about it, and after a couple of days we set off up north, Joan driving the Bentley.
We got to the MacEwens’ at Carthness in time for dinner on the second day; if I had been fit we should have done it in a day and not been tired. I stayed up there for ten days playing golf with Joan, and sailing their dinghy, and watching the birds. In that ten days my headaches went away, and I never got them back again. I get over these things pretty quickly as a rule.
Joan was up there for a month, but ten days was all that I could spare from the yard, and so I started off for home one morning in the Bentley. I took it easily because Joan had made me promise to spend two nights upon the way, and as she had been decent and not worried me about the crash I was inclined to keep my promise to her.
By six o’clock I was at Boroughbridge and wondering where I should put up for the night. York was not very far away, but I had stayed at York on the way up in a very famous hotel with faded lace curtains in the dining-room, and had not been impressed. And so for a whim, and because I wanted to see people of the sort that I do not usually meet, I went to Leeds and stayed in a very large and rather garish hotel in the middle of the town.
I was very lonely that night. I had left people who liked me in Scotland to come back down south to my empty house and to my own work, and though I knew that I should be content with my life when I got back to Dartmouth, for the moment I was discontented and upset. I dined alone and rather expensively in the more select of the two restaurants of the hotel, and at the table beside me there was a party of young men and women dining not wisely but too well. In the south they would have been thrown out with the hors d’œuvres, but they were having the devil of a good time and I would have given my eyes to have been with them. There were two or three parties of elderly business men with their unattractive wives drinking champagne in solemn state, and there were two or three fat, elderly foreigners dining alone like me and, like me, trying to pretend that they were enjoying their dinner. I got tired of the pretence half-way through and cut it short, ordered a cup of coffee, and went out.
In the hall one of the waiters found me a cigar. I hung about there for a bit and managed to get into conversation with the hall porter, and was pleased to do so. He told me about the theatres that were on and I didn’t like the idea of any of them, and then he started on the cinemas. And finally he said:
“There’s a good Palais de Dance if you’re fond of dancing, sir. Quite a good class place to-night. This is the two-shilling night, you know.”
I don’t dance more than once or twice a year, but I am very fond of it. This was something rather new to me, and so I said:
“They have professional partners there?”
He smiled fatly. “Oh, yes, sir. Sixpennies, you know. Sixpence a dance, or sixpence a sit out, which ever you happens to prefer. Nice respectable young ladies they are—mostly.”
I nodded. The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea. I could not face the thought of going through the evening alone, but for a pound or so I could hire a girl to spend the evening with me. For once in a way my money was some good to me, and so I went upstairs and changed my shoes, and went out to the Palais.
I sat at a table by the floor for some time before dancing. It must have been a pretty slack night at the Palais, because there cannot have been more than a dozen couples in the place. The sixpennies sat in a pen in the corner, smoking cigarettes and reading magazines; four or five girls in black silk dresses and the same number of slightly effeminate young men in dinner-jackets. There was one girl there that I liked the look of most, a little older than the rest, perhaps, and one who looked as if she wouldn’t be much effort for me to entertain. And so at last I walked up to the barrier and caught her eye, and I said: “Would you care to dance this one with me?”
She glanced quickly up and down the little row of girls; a sort of commercial rectitude that insisted that she must be quite sure that the invitation was to her, and not to her neighbour. And then she looked up at me and smiled, and said:
“Me? I’d like to very much.”
So we danced, and she asked me if I had been long in Leeds, and I made the usual talk about the band and the floor and my own dancing, and she gave little stilted answers. And suddenly it struck me that she was busy, almost too busy to talk. Then I fell over her feet and she said quickly: “Would you do that again?” I did it again, but her feet weren’t there that time. It took her about a minute and a half to learn my tricks. By the end of that quickstep I could do exactly what I liked; she danced magnificently. The dance came to a truncated end and the short encore; I walked her off the floor and put her back into the pen.
Three minutes later I got her out again for a waltz. Again she was busy at first, so that I left her alone and we danced that one in silence. I was taking her back to the pen again when she turned to me and said:
“You know, you don’t need to put me back in the pen again after every dance unless you want to. They let us go and sit with gentlemen at the tables, if you like.”
I said something suitable, and so we picked a table and sat down. And hardly was my chair drawn in when she remarked:
“Would you like anything from the soda fountain? A cup of coffee or anything? I’ll fetch the waitress for you, if you like.”
So I ordered a cup of coffee for her; she would not eat anything because eating between meals was bad for the figure. Then I bought her cigarettes. Then we danced again, and coming back to the table I had leisure to examine what I’d got.
She was not very tall, perhaps a little higher than my shoulder. She had long black hair tied up in coils about her ears and drawn straight back from her forehead; she was extravagantly made-up with a dead white complexion and deep red lips. She had very large, black eyes and rather a determined chin; when she smiled she was very friendly to me. Her eyelashes were separated into little groups, very long, each group waxed together like a little moustache. She wore a plain black silk dress and a very small gold watch upon her wrist.
I said what a pretty little watch it was; she was pleased, and took it off to show it to me. “A gentleman friend gave it to me,” she said, “when I was working at Leicester. He was nice to me—isn’t it lovely? It cost six pounds fifteen, and then he got something off because it was through a friend in the business. Another gentleman told me that you couldn’t buy a watch like this for under ten pounds. Fancy! But lots of the gentlemen give us quite nice presents.” I murmured something or other, and for a moment she paused to appraise my value. “He was married, but his wife used to go away a lot and then he got lonely and used to come and spend the evening with me. Are you married?”
“No,” I said, “I’m
not. Are you?”
She studied me for a moment through a haze of smoke. “No,” she said at last, “nor anywhere near it.”
She told me that her name was Miss Gordon, but her friends called her Mollie. “I do think it’s soft,” she said, “when professionals make up fancy names for themselves, like Edwina or Althea, like some of them do.” She laughed. “Fancy me talking like that! I mean, they call me Carmen here on Friday nights, because I do a speciality dance then—tango—I’ve got a lovely costume for it. I do it with one of the boys here, and he’s in costume too.” Then we talked about her profession; she told me that she was paid ten shillings a week and half the sixpences she earned. “But then there’s the tips,” she said, with studied nonchalance. “Some of the gentlemen are very generous. Then other times you’ll dance all night with a gentleman and never get a bean beyond the sixpences.”
She told me a little about her pay. It was a good week when she took home thirty shillings from the management; living by herself alone in rooms she could hardly have got along without the tips. I was sorry then that I had made her dig so laboriously for her gold, and so I said:
“How do the tips run out? Do people double the sixpences, or something like that?”
She looked across the table at me with something that was very much like friendship. “Not many,” she said generously. “You see, that comes to an awful lot if you dance all evening.” She eyed me for a moment. “You’ve not been to a Palais much, have you? It must be expensive for the gentlemen, having us girls for every dance. Would you like me to go back to the pen and dance again a bit later? Lots of people do that, you know.”
“Rather not,” I said. “I’ve got money to spend to-night, and I’m just beginning to enjoy myself.”
She laughed with me. “I like it when people have a good time here,” she said, “because it makes it much nicer, doesn’t it?” And then she asked me: “What’s your job?”
“I work for a shipping firm in the south,” I said. “I’m in the office.”
